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Hatsune Miku could be considered the very first digital character actor to achieve fame. But she's quite different to vtubers.

Miku is a 100% fabrication. She is a character that uses software called Vocaloid, a voice synthesiser, to sing. They make songs for her using it and then make digital/cgi/animated shorts for the songs. She performs gigs through a 3d projection.

Vtubers on the other hand are human beings using software to appear as animated characters. They do the same job as streamers do but they do it via a character that they perform as to varying degrees of quality. Some amateur vtubers perform mostly as themselves but with an animated avatar, whereas professional companies with fulltime staff have performers staying fully in character. The professional side of this new industry operates similar to the idol industry. They're wage paid contracted performers who leave within a few years because it's ultimately a dead end job with no growth. The industry is completely cutthroat too and performers are treated pretty much exactly the same way idols are treated. I suspect it's actually worse for the vtuber performers because they're not getting famous from it either, they're nobodies when off screen.

Vtubers are like so yesterday. Beantubers are the next big thing

v-tubers are a kind of animated avatar that people use on streaming platforms; places where you're sort of expected to have a webcam showing your reactions, but you don't want to because you're [trans and dysphoric, afraid of openly being a girl on the internet, shy, actually a dragon deep down, some other valid reason, or even an invalid reason because who cares]. They work various ways; some make the avatar try to map to what you're saying, some puppet it from keyboard controls, some try to match it to a webcam's output, whatever.

Hatsune Miku is a rubber band ball made of memes. There was a corporate mascot at some point, but tens of thousands of people have made her mean whatever they want her to mean, building layer after layer of conflicting meanings, until that's all there is. She's just Hatsune Miku.

Hatsune Miku is a completely different thing. Hatsune Miku is a character/voice for a synthetic instrument called Vocaloid which is developed and owned by Yamaha. It's a pretty cool piece of software where you input lyrics and a midi pattern, then the characters "sing". Basically people became fans of the marketing design for the Hatsune Miku character specifically and it blew up from there.

Hatsune Miku is a digital musical instrument, a piece of software which allows people to generate singing in a robotic Japanese voice by manually tuning each note. This is different from "AI" voice song generation because it actually requires work and skill and predates it by at least a decade. The blue haired character is the mascot of this piece of software, and the company behind it uses that mascot in various tie-in products like video games. There is no specific real human behind the Miku character.

Vtubers are like twitch streamers, but they're behind a fancy mask called a "model" which is animated by face and/or body tracking. Each one corresponds to a specific real human. The big/popular ones are part of agencies, generally out of Japan with corresponding Japanese-style workplace abuse. There are also people who do vtubing on their own, and generally have much less detailed and less animated models, all the way down to just bouncing a png of a face when they talk.

Yes, live performances by both are just on a screen, but with the other things I'm told people like about live events, like a big soundsystem and a crowd of fellow fans.

a v-tuber, or virtual tuber, is a kind of root vegetable that grows naturally on the internet

the invention of v-tubers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5E-1cZd-sI